A distributed database with self-extending capabilities, to compensate exclusion of malicious nodes

This paper is based on a decentralized distributed database, which runs on top of a peer-to-peer DHT. For this type of distributed systems we propose a lightweight mechanism to detect malicious nodes and to totally exclude them from the network. Moreover, we define a self-extending mechanism for the distributed system, which helps it include new peers in the right place, in order to minimize the impact of excluding the malicious nodes. Both of these mechanisms, which are sufficiently generic to be applied to any peer-to-peer-based application, and having impact on the shape of the peer-to-peer infrastructure, are evaluated and conclusions regarding their benefits and future improvements are drawn.